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It would be unfair to keep spending large sums of taxpayers’ money protecting
the Somerset Levels from flooding, according to the Government’s climate
change advisory body.

Defending the Levels will become “ever more difficult” because of more
frequent storms and rising seas, and diverting scarce public funds for new
defences could be poor value for money in a “largely artificial, engineered
wetland landscape”.

The intervention by the Committee on Climate Change came as Owen Paterson, the
Environment Secretary,
published a £100 million 20-year plan to protect the Levels by
raising roads and railways by up to 2m, building a tidal